Needless to say these ramblings are personal reflections and do not in any way represent official policy of the Fédération Protestante de France, my employer, nor of the churches I'm a minister of, the United Reformed Church and the Eglise Réformée de France.

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2008 was the international year of languages, the international year of the potato and the year for the protection of the frog. 2009 is the international year of reconciliaiton, the international year of astronomy, the Calvin year, the St Paul year and no doubt much more besides. Enjoy it all.2010 was the UN year of biodiversity and the year of the 100th anniversary of the Edinburgh mission conference2011 is the international year of forests - protect the trees and plant some folks!

Friday, 3 May 2013

So one of the joys of Germany are the bookshops, and one of the joys of the Kirchentag is the huge bookshop. I love this poster – Faith needs books! Fortunately even with a large suitcase I cannot buy everything I would like, nor should I. But the thing I love about wandering around tables of books I’m not going to buy are the thoughts that just the titles set off, they tend not to be particularly profound.Yesterday evening I did buy books for my faith, (more about them soon) but I stopped myself buying yet more Dorothee Sölle, though I sense I would love to have her complete poetic works ... (hint it is my 50th birthday later this year) But one title of hers really struck a chord with me “Against the luxury of hopelessness”. How dare we live without hope. Is it the affliction of the well-off to live without hope? Maybe. Perhaps affluent societies, particularly those built on the ethic of competition, with work for many being a desperate experience of social-darwinism. Yet how does telling those who cry out their hopelessness that their cries are a luxury, help them or make help progress. I have neither bought nor read the book ( I feel I ought in honesty to add – yet …) I thought of the hopeless situation in Syria. I thought of my own battles in recent years with a sense of personal hopelessness. Had that tearful and painful battle been a luxury? Walking away from the temptations of the bookshop, I wondered about the luxury of being hopeless and thought back to that time when I had felt hopelessness so acutely and realised that in many ways I had throughout that time continued to be hope-filled and to continue to hold out hope for others – at least in my preaching. Perhaps some of what I expressed at that time was self-indulgent. The Kirchentag theme is “as much as you need” Soviel du brauchst ... perhaps when we indulge in hopelessness then it is a luxury. Many in the world living in truly hopeless situations are busy - getting angry, saving their children, their neighbours, protecting themselves, fleeing and looking for enough food and water to make it through the day. they do not have the luxury of hopelessness.
I suppose the cynical me wonders about the false hope sometimes marketed to us like a commodity. I don't need much of that at all thanks. Enough I am looking forward I sense to another trip to the book tables before leaving Hamburg ... luxuriating in the commodity of buy books about luxury. enough for now.

I'm at the German Protestant Kirchentag in Hamburg. It is as always, brilliant, stimulating, prayerful.
And this is the way it goes, I receive insight from others ...Dr B attends a Bible study given by Margot Kässmann on the parable of the unjust judge and the widow in Luke 18. Later he tells me about it, brings me the text, telling me not only about the Dorothee Sölle poetry Kässmann interwove into the study, but also talking about the example of Elisabeth Schmitz, who during the years of National Socialism tried repeatedly to convince Karl Barth and others leading the Confessing Church of the need to take up the cause of non-arians in Germany. In 1935 she wrote and published a pamphlet anonymouslyZur Lage der deutschen Nichtarier. It was a lucid and sadly prophetic description of what was likely to happen to Jews and others under the National Socilist regime. She sent it to many of the leaders in the Confessing Church. You can read more about her in the German entry on wikipedia and I've quoted in full the passage from Kässmann's Bible study which mentions her at the end of this post.
What moved and shocked me was this - I should know about Elisabeth Schmitz. Decades ago I wrote a dissertation about the Confessing Church and Anti-Semitism. I got a special mention from the jury for what I wrote. Of course that is because at that time my academic adjudicators were as ignorant as I was, few people had heard of Elisabeth Schmitz, copies of what she wrote were just coming to light but were being wrongly attributed to another feisty women of that generation, Marga Meusel. When Schmitz died in 1977, just seven people attended her funeral ...

The witness of so many feisty women and men is lost.
I'm not going to say more, there is no moral to draw from this story, but I am thankful for the researcher's who have brought her writing and action back to us. That speaks to me of resurrection.

Here is the quote from Kässmann's Bible Study yesterday. Perhaps I should add that Bible study in this Kirchentag context was for 7,000 people.

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About Me

Jane

My name is Jane Stranz. I was born and brought up in Britain and am an ordained minister of the United Reformed Church, a small non-conformist church. For over 10 years I worked as a parish minister in the Eglise Réformée de France in Dunkerque, Chambéry and Ferney-Voltaire. Fom July 2002 to October 2011 I led the language service of the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Currently I'm working on a two year mission on ecumenical relations, inter-religious dialogue and inter-cultural ministry with the Fédération Protestante de France based in Paris. It's going to be exciting and a steep learning curve. I'm married to Stephen Brown a journalist, researcher and theologian who works at Gobethics.net. Over the next two years we'll see how we manage a commuting marriage between Paris and Ferney Voltaire. Since 1999 I've been living with multiple sclerosis, sounds rather noble but really means I just live in denial and inject interferon b three times a week and count myself very lucky to live in a country with a great health care system.